Shorelines (29 page)

specialising in hidden cameras, bugging and de-bugging”

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”

– Henry Ford

“Don’t upset me. I’ve run out of places to hide the bodies.” – Anon.

Latimer’s Landing had been named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who first discovered a dead coelacanth (aka Old Four Legs), a fossil fish that once left the sea to stump around on land and decided hell no, this isn’t for me, returning swiftly to the waters. But it still had those stubby little legs.

Marjorie was called down to the East London docks one day in 1938 to check out a load of sharks that had just come in on the boat
Nerine
. She noticed a strange-looking blue fin sticking out from the pile of otherwise pure shark.

“I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” she told author Samantha Weinberg in
A Fish Caught in Time
. “It had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy-dog tail.”

The part I liked in Weinberg’s book was the struggle Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had in handling the rather bulky coelacanth. Firstly, the taxi driver wouldn’t have “that stinking fish” in his cab. He finally allowed her to put it into the boot.

The only place to store such a large fish was the mortuary, she reckoned. But the mortuary officer thought she was mad. The people at the local cold-storage depot also refused the coelacanth entry. So she and a local taxidermist decided to preserve it in formalin, keeping it wrapped in copies of the
Daily Dispatch
and her mother’s double-bed sheet until it could go off to Professor JLB Smith from Rhodes University.

Lew, knowing we’d be looking for something more than regular tourist snapshots of East London, took us to a place in the local harbour where more than a kilometre of hardwood – worth about $25 million – stood piled. These trees had been cut from the first-growth forests of equatorial Africa and loaded onto a boat called the
Kiperousa
, destined for south-east Asia and life as millions of strips of veneer.

But the
Kiperousa
had sunk just south of East London, and these huge logs had drifted off into the sea lanes. Some had beached themselves, others were still out there, waiting to smash into a passing yacht.

But a bigger problem lay before us. There had been a wave of criminal attacks on tourists along the Wild Coast in 2005. Jules and I were driving into another kind of fire. Snatches of the
Daily Dispatch
headlines were beginning to worry me:

•  May: Three men shoot dead a security guard at Mbotyi River Lodge and wound the manager, Charles Lamb; Eight elderly tourists attacked – two are killed – by hijackers outside Port St Johns;

•  July: A group of tourists attacked at knife point by youths while on a hike outside Port St Johns;

•  October: Four foreign tourists escape with their lives when armed gunmen open fire on two vehicles near Coffee Bay.

Jo’burgers live and sleep in a hotbed of crime. There’s always someone getting shot, hijacked, robbed or raped back home. And yet, when we go on holiday to the country’s poorest province, we expect safe passage, warm welcomes and good fishing. And the weather had better play its part, too.

I was 21 years old again, sitting in the rain on the back of a
bakkie
on the way to the Stormberg, with my old Neil Young song and my fear. I desperately needed a bottle of sweet wine, a length of boerewors and some reassuring words. Failing that, an armed escort up into the Wild Coast …

When I think about the Morgan Bay Hotel, a cockatoo called Baldy and a woman called Dodo spring to mind.

We’re trying to have a beer in the courtyard of this old hotel, shortly after checking in. A sulphur-crested cockatoo is doing his nut in the corner, screaming like a midnight drunk. He whistles and yells and spins and performs daring somersaults around the rope inside his cage.

Baldy’s been there for 17 years now, shouting the odds at no one in particular. They sometimes let him roam through the hotel like a maddened banshee. And if one neglects to compliment him on his magnificent singing voice or hairstyle, Baldy does odd things like ripping the rubber trim off the windows.

He is often to be found in the bar after supper, scrounging peanuts from the guests. Give him an opened tin of tomato cocktail and he’ll grip it firmly in his beak and down the lot. And then you must applaud his drinking expertise.

This hotel was all about serious repeat business. The icon of the ‘come-again’ crowd at the Morgan Bay Hotel was one Mrs Dodo Wilmot. The Wilmots had been vacationing here for six decades. Every year, they booked Room No. 2. Mrs Dodo Wilmot, now a widow, arrived here and met up with her son, who flew in from his home in the USA for a two-week family holiday.

“Mrs Wilmot is the first in for breakfast and supper,” the owner-manager Richard Warren-Smith told us over tea one afternoon in the expansive old sitting room with the sea view, where, on a good day, you could see hundreds of dolphins leaping up through the breakers. “She’ll stand there tapping her foot if we’re one minute late.”

After World War II, Richard’s grandfather Ivan returned from hostilities and wanted nothing more than to run a beach hotel on his beloved Eastern Cape coast.

He chose Morgan’s Bay, which had been a holiday village since the early 1900s, when settler families trekked here in their ox wagons, bringing ‘food on the hoof’ in the form of cows and sheep. In 1920 a retired hospital matron opened a boarding house in Morgan’s Bay. She tried selling it, but there was no shortage of shysters in the area, so she had to take the house back a number of times. And then came Ivan Warren-Smith. He caught a bus up from East London, walked to the top of the hill overlooking the bay and fell in love with it all. Maybe the dolphins were showing off that day.

Ivan paid the matron £4 000 for her boarding house, parked his Oldsmobile and caravan on the premises and began turning it all into his dream hotel. It morphed into the Warren-Smith family business over the generations. As a young man, Richard went to London to work in the hotel trade as preparation for eventually taking over the Morgan Bay Hotel. It was just too damned cold over there for the boy from Kei Mouth.

“When I came back in 1990, my father Jeffrey just passed me the
braai
tongs at a hotel lunch and said carry on,” laughed Richard. Thus he joined the hotel’s management team.

The Morgan Bay Hotel was “like coming home” – true to its motto. South Africa lost something from the ’60s onwards, when many of its family hotels gave way under the onslaught of franchise operations. Jules and I were delighted to run across establishments where the dining rooms were still vast, the menus short and the manager not too snooty to sit down and have a drink with the guests. Where you stepped over sleeping old dogs at the entrance, the hotel cockatoo ruled the roost and the information booklet requested “the more jubilant guests” to be quiet at the poolside in the early afternoon.

The next morning we left on our Wild Coast ‘amble’ across Kei Mouth and up to our next stop, Trennery’s. A cheerful young man called Bongani Colonial Mlilwane, who had 15 siblings and lived nearby, was our guide for the first half of our 14-km walk.

Colonial said he was in heaven every day.

“I used to work as a school security guard on the Cape Flats,” he said. “I lived in a shack. I saw gunfights and shack fires until I thought no, it’s time to go home. Now I walk up and down the beach, talking to my guests. What could be more pleasant?”

Prompted by various sightings of
abaKwetha
along the way, we asked Colonial about his personal initiation to manhood, which involved a painful bush circumcision.

“I was with a group of friends all doing this thing together. Our wounds were bound by absorbent leaves, which were changed every 15 minutes. We were each given a new white blanket with red stripes. We were warned: the headman does not want policemen or ambulances coming here.

“You are not a man if you have to go to a hospital, they said. By the fourth day, you feel so much pain and you have no strength and you do not care if you die.”

In the first week, the initiates covered themselves with white clay and slept in designated huts. Sisters could bring them food or firewood but on no account were they to see their mothers. After four weeks – God willing – they were healed.

“A goat is slaughtered and prepared for you,” said Colonial. “You drink beer and you are allowed to cross the river and hunt. It is a big thing to become a man. No woman would think of marrying you if you were uncircumcised. And if you are not, you remain a boy, no matter how old you are.”

We were suddenly at the swine-fever control point on the Kei River Mouth. I’d been living in Colonial’s head for more than an hour, viewing out-takes from his world. We came across a jovial, middle-aged squad of South African and Brit hikers, heading south on the ‘amble’. They were doing the long trek from Kob Inn to Morgan’s Bay. Colonial took over their group from Eric Nkonki, who became our guide.

We crossed the Kei River by ferry, a large-bottomed boat expertly manhandled by a team who twirled giant wheels attached to rudders and outboard engines.

Then we were in the old Transkei. And the weather was also from another country. It turned grey and foul and windy in no time at all. The morning’s jaunt had turned into
The Lost Patrol
. We trudged, looking down and saying nothing in case of sand-in-mouth, against a vicious headwind. We were joined by Eric’s friend, a guy called Amos, who wore very fancy leather shoes. So fancy that, when we crossed little rivers and streams, he prevailed upon Eric to piggyback him across.

“Here is the Gxara River,” announced Eric. “Do you know this place? Up the river is the pool where the Nongqawuse went, where she was given the vision.”

We’d been reading Noel Mostert’s epic
Frontiers
, detailing the demise of the Xhosa nation in British colonial times, and
The Dead Will Arise
by Jeff Peires, which told the story of the infamous cattle killing of 1857.

Reel back to just before 1820, as more than 300 000 unemployed soldiers who’ve fought Napoleon’s armies sit idle in grubby, disconsolate, post-war Britain. An advertising campaign is launched to encourage at least 5 000 Britons to come and live in South Africa, “the most precious and magnificent object of our colonial policy”, according to
The Times
of London.

They’re supposed to be agriculturalists, destined for the border lands of the Eastern Cape. But many tradesmen, artisans and mechanics pretend to be farmer types and make it onto the transfer list. A fair number of them fail as farmers, but end up building magnificent settlements such as Grahamstown instead. These families,
faux
farmers and genuine, are the buffer zone between the Cape Colony and “the warlike Xhosas”, as some like to call them.

Now fast-forward 34 years through a number of bloody frontier wars to 1853 and to the landing of a smallish herd of Friesian bulls from Europe at Mossel Bay. They’ve all got the dreaded lung-sickness and are rotten from the inside out. Within two years, this disease has spread all over the colony and up through Xhosa country.

Three years later we’re in April 1856, at a pool on the Gxara River in the company of two young girls, Nongqawuse and Nombanda. Something happens at that pool on that day, something that is still the subject of heated debate today, nearly 150 years on.

Nongqawuse’s uncle, Mhalakaza, has been working for the Archdeacon of Grahamstown, Nathaniel Merriman, on the cleric’s travels in the hinterland as his travelling advisor and translator. Mhalakaza has cherry-picked more than his share of biblical Christian knowledge, imagery and philosophy from his boss. He blends this with his inherent set of Xhosa principles and becomes something of a grand speechmaker himself. Merriman’s wife insults Mhalakaza one day and the Xhosa leaves their employ and goes back to his homestead on the Gxara River.

We’re with the girls at the pool, and Mhalakaza is lurking somewhere in the dramatic background. Two men claiming to be long-dead Xhosas materialise from the bushes. They tell the girls to pass on the message: there is going to be a ‘rising up’ and a rebirth of the Xhosa nation. All cattle are to be killed. The cultivated fields are to be burnt. Corn storage bins are to be trashed. Fresh kraals are to be built. ‘New people’ will rise from the sea with healthy herds of cattle for everyone. Whites and Fingoes (who side with the British) will be swept off to sea and disappear forever.

The Xhosa nation is divided into believers and non-believers. The believers destroy their food stores and their cattle herds. You can smell rotting meat all over the frontier. Fires rage all over the Eastern Cape. A nation waits. The non-believers say, What? You want me to do what? Kill my precious cattle? Burn my food? Believe a couple of teenage girls and their angry uncle?

Various appointed days “of the two suns rising red” come and go. Mixed in with all this prophecy and madness is the news that the Russians have smacked the Brits in the Crimea and that those same Russians are on their way to help clear out the governor, Sir George Grey, his cronies and his ‘buffer zoners’.